By Jim Hightower On 11-24-15
Thanksgiving — let’s eat!
America’s most food-focused holiday traces its roots back to the
abundant feast that Pilgrims and Indians enjoyed together in the fall of
1621. Not even half of the 100 or so Mayflower Pilgrims and crew who
had arrived at Plymouth Rock the previous December survived their grim
first year in the New World (“new,” of course, only to those
undocumented immigrants — not to the local citizens).
Still, to celebrate and offer thanks for their survival, the English
migrants planned a communal meal following the fall harvest. And in
appreciation to the Wampanoag for teaching them to raise corn and gather
the region’s seafood, they also invited Massasoit, the tribal leader,
to join them. He did, surprising the hosts by arriving with 90 members
of his community. But they didn’t come empty-handed; instead they
brought much of the fare for what became a sumptuous, three-day banquet
featuring venison, duck, goose, wild turkey, eel, mussel, lobster,
gooseberries, plums, cornmeal pudding, popcorn balls (who knew!), barley
beer and fortified wine. And you thought you overate at Thanksgiving!
But this was not the first precursor of our annual November
Food-a-Palooza. Texans assert the tradition began near El Paso in 1598,
when the Manso and Piro tribes roasted fowl and fish for a lost and
bedraggled group of Spanish colonizers. Floridians insist that the
firstest-of-all Thanksgivings was in 1565, when the Timucuans shared a
stew of salt pork and garbanzo beans with Spanish settlers at St.
Augustine.